Game Kids: Walk the Dogs (and a Giveaway!)
17 Feb
My kids have a new favorite family game:
Walk the Dogs by SimplyFun.
That Doggie Bag of 63 tiny plastic doggies is absolutely the game’s biggest draw. My kids – and all the other kids we’ve played this game with – are so interested in holding and touching, trading and arranging these dogs even before the game begins.
The first step is to find a nice big space to play, and the kids take all of the tiny dogs out of the bag and line them up in one big, long, curving, snaking line. Just make sure that the dogs are all head-to-tail. Even this first step is a fun one for the kids!
Each player gets two cards to hold and draws a third card at the beginning of each turn. The cards let you take dogs from the front of the line, the back of the line, your choice, or from another player’s dogs. When you take dogs from the main line, you add them to your own doggie line in front of you. After all the dogs have been claimed, you score points for the dogs in your own line – groups of 2, 3, or 4 dogs score better than a single dog, and that adds simple strategy as you’re choosing your dogs during the game.
KarateKid, who is 7, enjoys the simple strategy of the game and tries to plan a couple of moves ahead to string together the most dogs of one kind.
What I love about Walk the Dogs is that GoGoGirl, who is 3, can play right along with us, minus any thought of strategy! She draws a card on her turn, chooses one of her cards to play, and counts the correct number of dogs from the line. It’s a great game to play to include her – she gets just as many turns as everyone else, and gets to hold the cards, play the cards and arrange her dogs.
Another thing that I like about this game is that once you’ve learned the rules, you can keep the dogs and the deck of cards right inside the “Doggie Bag” that comes with the game, and that makes the game very easy to take along wherever you go – we’ve played Walk the Dogs at friends’ homes, the Y, and several restaurants!
It’s easy to learn, extremely appealing to kids, and encourages a little bit of strategic thinking.
Does it sound good to you too? The folks at SimplyFun have sent me an extra copy to give away!
If you’d like to win your own copy of Walk the Dogs, please leave us a comment. And my kids love reading interesting comments, so it would be nice if you could tell us your kids’ favorite game, or a funny story about dogs, or something else to liven up our day!
For extra entries, you can blog, tweet, and/or post at Facebook about this contest – just leave an extra comment telling me how you spread the word, and where.
I’ll leave this contest open until MechDaddy’s birthday – March 5 – so you have 2 weeks and 2 days to spread the word and enter! Good luck.
This review and giveaway was sponsored by SimplyFun. They provided me with a copy of the game to review and a copy to give away, but did not compensate me in any other way. The opinions above are mine.
Well, we are just starting Games with Connor and he loves the 5 Little Monkey’s Jumping on the Bed… I think he loves playing with the monkeys, and making his own game up! We laugh hysterically and he makes up a new one.. so the dog game would fit the bill for playing for real and making up our own versions.
That is so cute! Trisha would really enjoy it.
Some of our family’s favorite board/card games are Apples to Apples, In a Pickle (Trishy plays along with these, even though she doesn’t read yet), Rat-a-Tat-Cat (HUGE hit with everybody … thank you again!
), Blink, Pass the Popcorn (movie trivia game — I bet you can’t guess who is into that one!) and — for James — YuGiOh! We also like Mastermind and Memory/Concentration games.
This sounds like a really fun game and something that could last us through several ages.
I love games that the whole family can play. We like Uno and Dominoes. I want to make some Alphabet dominoes for them to help my youngest learn her letters better.
Our new favorite game is Blokus. We love dogs here. We have a lopsipoo who will be 3 in April. His name is Streak. We saw him born and we fell in love with him immediately!! He’s a crazy dog, but we love him just the same! He’s full of energy!!!
We love lots of games! My 6 y/o son Jack has a card game he loves that’s about toads where you have to stick your tongue out a bunch of times when you change the numbers. It’s called “King Toad” and his dad looks really silly when he plays with Jack!
My kids would LOVE this game, especially since we have our new dog! They are into Monopoly Star Wars edition right now and are begging me to get the Mario Bros. monopoly edition. Hope to see you soon!
I would love to win this for my 2 daughters. They would love this game. They both want a puppy so bad and we cant get one with there alleries. Thank you
My 7 & 9 year old girls are DOG CRAZY and would love to play this game. For my 7yr olds birthday party in March, she is having a party at the local SPCA so that she can hang out with the dogs (and cats) and she is having a dog bone shaped birthday cake.
Oh goodness, I’d have miniature dogs all over the place, LOL! Andrew would be beside himself I’m sure. Looks like fun!
A dogs story… hmmm….
Well when I was a teenager we used to live in a little town in Northern Ontario and had just moved into a tiny little house. On our first night there the screen door fell apart and ten thousand mosquitos swarmed in (ok, maybe it wasn’t 10 thousand, maybe only several hundred, but it hardly mattered). ANYWAY… the mosquitos were keeping me awake. I was awake enough to notice a funny noise coming from the basement. It was a snuffling noise. This went on for quite a while. Then I heard a little “woof”. I called for my dog (a cocker spanial) , but he didn’t come to me. Uh Oh. I went downstairs and tried to find the light to the basement. No luck. So I carefully shuffled down the basement stairs. I had never been in this basement before and didn’t know where the walls were. So there I was – in the pitch dark – trying to find my dog. I could hear him snuffling somewhere, but kept bumping my head on things. I decided to crawl on my hands and knees toward the noise. Suddenly the floor vanished beneath my hands and I was trying not to fall into a pit filled with cold water. But there was my dog! He’d fallen into the hole and had been swimming around for who knows how long! He was VERY glad to see me
This sounds like the perfect game for my daughter!! She loves animals and has lots and lots of those Schleich toy animals that she always plays with. Our favorite games are Apples to Apples, Rat-a-Tat-Cat, Sleeping Queens, Pacardy, and all those fabulous point-n-click mind games on the Internet! Hope we win! Would love to play Walk The Dog
We love strategy games.
This sounds like a great game. My daughter and the kids that I watch would really love to play this game. We like to make up all kinds of games. Our favorite game right now is pretending we are dogs, and boy do we mess up the house! We are a pack of noisy dogs! This sounds great and I like that it is easy to follow as I have young kids in the house too. Thanks so much for sharing.
My kids think this game would be lots of fun and a bonus is that these dogs would not get us in trouble for barking!
I blogged about it.
http://qamom.blogspot.com/2010/03/games-games-and-more-games.html
my neice and nephew aren’t really fans of dogs, except mine and my husbands, it’s a boston terrier. when we come in to visit, they just love on him, and they ask about him when we talk on the phone.